Battle Royale: Chat GPT vs Professors

I was recently reading the Wall Street Journal and came across an article written by Douglas Belkin that studied a SoCal professor’s take on teaching post-COVID.

Apparently, this particular professor was approached by a student who did not want the possibility of her classmates cheating within virtual classrooms to ruin her high GPA, so she wanted safeguards. Given this, he changed his written and online administered tests to oral exams which helped combat cheating the curve.

Here’s what I’ve noticed:

With the increase in technology and the abilities of technology, preventing cheating in a college lecture hall has been a magical work of art where you have to literally be in 20 places at once.

While programs/features like Turnitin can help catch plagiarism for online submissions, it’s often still difficult to control for everything. Counting on the integrity of your students and counting on their fears surrounding cheating is apparently not enough when considering that many people think that they are above getting caught. So, what does that mean for the people who are working hard for their grades?

Luckily in my classes, I can tell who is doing what work. I make it to where I learn my student’s work product and their work ethics early on which works to both their benefit and their detriment, should they decide to cheat.

My classes include oral and written opportunities to obtain points towards a good grade. And throughout the course, I get to gather insight on what the student thinks about the material and how they approach their learning. My biggest issue is generally that students don’t seem to be aware of the fact that they can take their educations into their own hands. While this means less cheating and more proactive learning, working and doing, COVID has certainly changed the amount of initiatives that my students take.

For now, I am trusting the process [and my students] with the use of written, oral and computer-submissions with the help of Turnitin to catch possible plagiarism.

ChatGPT has been causing quite the conversation and stirring up a multitude of industries lately so it’s certainly one to be on the lookout for (well, all AI in general), but hopefully this post sheds a bit of light about it’s potential uses in the lecture hall.

Best,
Bree